Where do they come from?

In this moist season,
mist on the lake and thunder
afternoons in the distance

they ooze up through the earth
during the night,
like bubbles, like tiny
bright red balloons
filling with water;
a sound below sound, the thumbs of rubber
gloves turned softly inside out.

In the mornings, there is the leaf mold
starred with nipples,
with cool white fishgills,
leathery purple brains,
fist-sized suns dulled to the colors of embers,
poisonous moons, pale yellow.

Where do they come from?

For each thunderstorm that travels
overhead there's another storm
that moves parallel in the ground.
Struck lightning is where they meet.

Underfoot there's a cloud of rootlets,
shed hairs or a bundle of loose threads
blown slowly through the midsoil.
These are their flowers, these fingers
reaching through darkness to the sky,
these eyeblinks
that burst and powder the air with spores.

They feed in shade, on halfleaves
as they return to water,
on slowly melting logs,
deadwood. They glow
in the dark sometimes. They taste
of rotten meat or cloves
or cooking steak or bruised
lips or new snow.

It isn't only
for food I hunt them
but for the hunt and because
they smell of death and the waxy
skins of the newborn,
flesh into earth into flesh.

Here is the handful
of shadow I have brought back to you:
this decay, this hope, this mouth-
ful of dirt, this poetry.

 Margaret Atwood  knows her stuff. As a child she spent the summers in the Canadian forests where her father worked as an entomologist and the whole family accompanied him. She didn't go to school properly until she was 12.

What I especially like in this poem is Atwood's recognition that the mushrooms (wax caps in this case) don't exist on their own but are simply the public face of an underlying network of mycelia and hyphae - the threads and filaments that exchange sustenance with the roots of plants and trees as well as the earth itself. And I like that in the photograph it's possible to see that the grass is not just grass, it includes moss and the tiny leaves of many other plants. Which is why the wax caps grow here: the green sward has not been disturbed, cultivated or fertilised. 

Margaret Atwood (@wood!) will be 80 in a few days time and she has recently been the joint winner of the Booker Prize. May she continue to fructify!